Winchester 94 in 356 Win won't shoot! Help!

[DonMountain]

I tried firing my wife's deer rifle, and it won't strike the primers. Its a Winchester Big Bore 94 in 356 Winchester. We check fired it over the summer and I cleaned the barrel and oiled it. When she took it out for deer season Saturday, and tried to shoot a deer, the hammer did not dent the primer. It looks to me like maybe the little button that the lever pushes up on to allow it to shoot is stuck and you can't raise the lever as far as it used to go. Is there a way to take this apart to clean it all up and oil it? On my other 94 rifle, the lever depresses this button all the way so the lever comes to the stock.

[pietro]

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If you pull the buttstock, you will have a clear view of the side of the lower tang, where the lever safety resides.

You should then be able to determine if there's a piece of debris (or other issue) in there that's keeping the lever safety from being de-activated for firing.

However, I suspect that your BB94AE may have the rebounding hammer (no half cock notch) - which has been discovered to give light primer strikes in Winchester 94AE's & other Winchesters with the occasional misfiring issue.

If your rifle does have a rebounding hammer, the fix is fairly simple if you're mechanically inclined.

The reason for the fix is that (on some rebounders) the forward end of the mainspring strut is forked, with the upper fork driving the hammer, and the lower fork pushing the hammer back, off the firing pin. (for "safety")

Sometimes the lower leg is a tad too long, which allows it to actually retard the intensity of the hammer hitting the firing pin.

The cure is to remove the MS strut & slightly shorten that lower fork leg.


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[Ragnarok]

Maybe the tip broke off the firing-pin?....Not unheard of with a Winchester M94. The button the lever raises up allows the trigger to be pulled making sure the rifle is in battery. If the hammer is falling the issue is likely something else

[DonMountain]

I checked the firing pin and it is free to move and the tip is not broken off. I oiled the safety button and it seems to be free to move also. But that darn cross-bolt safety button seems to be hanging up some. I oiled that to see if I can make it work. My wife now tells me she had trouble last year with that cross-bolt safety button being hard to push off.

[DonMountain]

I finally found out what was wrong with the 356 Winchester. Some small particle of dirt was keeping that darn safety cross-button from being pushed all the way over to the left side of the rifle, so the hammer was just striking a bare minimum of the shaft to keep it off the firing pin. So, I told my wife to not use that "safety" again. To just cock and shoot the rifle like we did in the old days with the old Winchester 94's. But to just be careful of decocking it after loading a round.